We depend on our words … Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly. ~ Niels Bohr

I am doing it the it I am doing is the I that is doing it the I that is doing it is the it I am doing it is doing the I that am doing it I am being done by the it I am doing it is doing it ~ Ronald David Laing ~

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. ~ Niels Bohr

One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate ~ Ronald David Laing ~

The Letheri are masters at corruptingwords, their meanings. They call warpeace, they call tyrannyliberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personalGod is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

The belief of some governments that nuclear weapons are a legitimate and essential source of security is not only misguided, but also dangerous, for it incites proliferation and undermines disarmament. Allnations should reject these weapons completely — before they are ever used again. This is a time of great global tension, when fiery rhetoric could all too easily lead us, inexorably, to unspeakable horror. The specter of nuclear conflict looms large once more. If ever there were a moment for nations to declare their unequivocal opposition to nuclear weapons, that moment is now.

Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And peopledie.

3 Kalki 23:31, 6 October 2005 (UTC) When good quotes by someone have been found, I generally prefer to to use them on birth dates rather than death dates, though Poe's death date seems one good case for an exception. Though I have some desire to see this used, as it does refer to the act of quotation, there are many other passages of Poe I would prefer, including "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" - even though this is very similar to another line from the same poem that has already been used.

1 Kalki 11:49, 6 October 2007 (UTC) 2 Kalki 23:31, 6 October 2005 (UTC) I think this could be used in some context in the future, but don't feel an urgency to use it at this time... I'm sure it will be back...

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear. ~ Heinrich Himmler (born October 7)

4 because fear has always been a powerful weapon. The spreading of fear allows for the highest amount of respect to be given, a respect dominated strongly by the will to survive. A very similar quotation is said by Darth Maul in Star Wars and is one of my favorites. Both in fiction and history, this ideology is powerful and enigmatic. Zarbon 04:39, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him. ~ Steven Erikson

...we also need to build our home and make it strong and well protected. We see, after all, what is going on in the world. The Comrade Wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone. ~ Vladimir Putin

Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane. ~ Ronald David Laing

3 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC) but this needs sourcing and I would prefer it to be extended for context, and I probably won't have time to seek this myself today ~ Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. ~ Desmond Tutu

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context. ~ Steven Erikson

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based. ~ Niels Bohr

Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. ~ Ronald David Laing

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. ~ Ronald David Laing

In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside. Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its particular level of knowledge.

I can quite understand why we cannot speak about the content of religion in an objectifying language. The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man's relationship with the central order.

Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence, he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures — consciously or unconsciously.

I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

The most important of all of the rights, really the foundation of all rights, are the rights to private property. But the right to private property is a right for each individual human being to own himself.

The origin of all constitutional rights, according to Lincoln, was the right that a man had to own himself, and therefore to own the product of his own labor. Government exists to protect that right, and to regulate property only to make it more valuable to its possessors.

There is not now, and never has been any such difference between one human being and another human being, or whatever race or color, such that one is by nature the ruler of the other, as any human being is by nature the ruler of any dog or any horse. For this reason, legitimate political authority can arise only by the consent of the governed, and consent can never be given for any reason other than the equal protection of the rights of the governed. Hence equal protection is the foundation of all constitutionalism.